


Atop the Ashes

by INMH



Series: hc_bingo Fanfiction Fills 2016 [1]
Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies), X-Men (Movieverse), X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: (and I do not mean that in a kink context), (literally), (sort of), Alternate Ending, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Bad Ending, Blood, Body Horror, Breeding, Dark, Disturbing Themes, Drama, F/M, M/M, Mental Breakdown, Mpreg, Nightmares, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Non-Consensual Pregnancy, Not A Happy Ending, Post-Apocalypse, Spoilers, Strong Language, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt, Suspense, semi-graphic birth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-02
Updated: 2016-07-03
Packaged: 2018-07-19 16:11:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 14,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7368502
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/INMH/pseuds/INMH
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU to X-Men: Apocalypse, specifically the ending. When En Sabah Nur is finished with the world, there isn’t much of anyone or anything left. That leaves Charles in a poor position. </p><p>**MIND THE WARNINGS PLEASE. THERE ARE MANY, BUT <b>MAJOR CHARACTER DEATH AND RAPE/NON-CON</b> IN PARTICULAR ARE PRESENT**</p><p>(ALSO: While the warnings are all there, other tags may be added at some point.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Yo, seriously. Mind the warnings. This is one of those stories that's more likely to squick you somehow than not.
> 
> So… Fun fact! I was in this fandom (The X-Men Cinematic Universe) years ago, when I first started writing fanfiction. And my return to said fandom features this dark-ass everybody-dies, bad-guy-wins, body-horror, mpreg En Sabah Nur/Charles monstrosity. 
> 
> Wow. I have come a long way from the eleven year-old that shipped Logan and Storm. I gotta re-watch those movies.
> 
> Anyways, enjoy this abomination of a nightmare I've written.

The world ended in fire, and Charles felt the deaths of millions in his mind much like one might feel the wave of a tsunami bearing down on them.  
  
The difference, of course, being that one would barely feel the pain of the wave before a very abrupt death. Charles was alive to experience, process, and remember the agony. All of it, in glaring, _screaming_ detail.  
  
“Behold the glory, Charles,” En Sabah Nur said, aloud and in Charles’s head, the latter the only voice totally audible over the cacophony of the world’s destruction and his own screams. “Behold, the beauty of a world made new.”  
  
But all Charles could do was scream.  
  
[---]  
  
At the end of the world, there were five people left standing.  
  
En Sabah Nur stood proud and tall, smug at his victory. Three of his followers remained still at his side; the girl with the lightning, the woman with the energy-whip, and the boy with the wings.  
  
Erik was gone.  
  
It had taken the prospective of the end of the world to make him understand that destruction of every one of his perceived enemies, true or not, would not bring an end to his pain, nor would it bring justice in any sense of the word. His last decision had been to join Charles’s students in their fight. His last act had been to attempt to shield Jean from En Sabah Nur’s wrath.  
  
He had failed.  
  
And Charles was alone amidst the sudden, deafening silence of the new world.  
  
[---]  
  
The transference failed.  
  
It simply wouldn’t work.  
  
Judging from En Sabah Nur’s reaction, the confusion that was the first and only indicator of anything even vaguely resembling humanity, that had been the first time a transference had ever failed. “You continue to be a surprise to me, Charles,” he said, settling a heavy hand, touch deceptively gentle, on Charles’s clavicle. “But I’m sure I’ll find a use for you yet.”  
  
“Kill me,” Charles said coldly, flatly. He meant it.  
  
But En Sabah Nur merely chuckled. “Now, where would the fun be in that?”  
  
‘Fun’. Of course.  
  
With the world and all its inhabitants destroyed, the false god would need something to amuse him, wouldn’t he?  
  
[---]  
  
  
One of the first things En Sabah Nur did, once the dust had settled, was send his Horsemen out to look for survivors.  
  
“If they are mutants, bring them to me. Accept them with open arms.” He instructed them. “And if they are humans, do the same. Bring them to me, and I will find a place for them in our new world.”  
  
“Under your boot,” Charles growled to himself. He didn’t doubt that En Sabah Nur heard; he just didn’t care. In any case, he doubted some horrific punishment would come from saying what everyone already knew and accepted to be true.  
  
“Rest assured, the world will be rebuilt. And this time, it will be a far better one.”  
  
Charles rolled his eyes and shook his head. But his followers, Psylocke, Angel, and Storm all watched and listened with sincere, rapt attention. And when En Sabah Nur opened portals for them to travel what was left of the world in search of survivors, they went without question.  
  
The way the older mutant (he was not a God, Charles would never address him as such) sighed seemed to indicate weariness. “Charles, Charles, Charles…” He turned and strolled towards Charles, sharp eyes looking him up and down. “What, oh what, am I to do with you?”  
  
“Kill me.” Charles repeated, although this time the words were accompanied by a deep shiver that crept down his spine. He said the words, he meant them, but the lack of fear or dread or care had lessened since the failed transference. He embraced death because there was no other viable option, not because he really and truly desired it.  
  
Yet.  
  
“I’ve already given my stance on that option.” En Sabah Nur clucked, shaking his head, and Charles wondered how difficult it might be to get high enough up the pyramid and throw himself out the window. Would the slanted sides of the structure prevent a clean death? His death would have to be immediate, fast enough to prevent En Sabah Nur from healing him.  
  
“Rethink it.” Charles responded bluntly.  
  
En Sabah Nur chuckled, and his voice began to take on that eerie quality, the one that echoed, made it sound like two separate beings were speaking at once through him. “No, no...” He knelt down before Charles, bringing up a hand to touch the side of his face. Charles thought about jerking away from him, but given their proximity and his inability to move anywhere quickly, he knew it would be in vain.  
  
“Stop touching me.”  
  
“You’re so stubborn, Charles,” En Sabah Nur cooed, stroking Charles’s cheek in a sick parody of genuine affection, “Why continue with this pointless resistance? I’ve won. Why not let go, give into me, instead of persisting with this tiring obstinacy?”  
  
Something hot and ugly reared up in Charles’s gut, and this time, he _did_ grab En Sabah Nur’s hand and force it away from his face. “You murdered my friends! My _students!_ ” His voice cracked horribly and obviously on that last word, a vivid picture of Jean’s terrified face in his mind. “I watched them, I _felt_ them die! It will be cold day in hell before I give into you.”  
  
En Sabah Nur stared at him for a long moment. “You miss your children,” He said, tone one of contemplation.  
  
“No _shit._ ”  
  
But still En Sabah Nur stared, and though Charles glared right back at him, an unsettling feeling arose in his stomach. He did not like the way the ancient mutant was looking at him, and he did not like the fact that he had seen a similar expression on Erik’s face right before some of his more destructive plots.  
  
“Very well, Charles,” En Sabah Nur whispered. “Very well.”  
  
[---]  
  
That night, Jean visited him.  
  
Charles awoke in a daze, confused and bleary-eyed. Her vibrant red hair caught his attention immediately. It took a moment of staring to fully realize who it was sitting on the bed.  
  
“Jean,” He croaked.  
  
“Hello, Professor.” She said sadly.  
  
He pulled her into a hug, choking out a sob. It was impossible to accurately describe what he felt- there were too many feelings, relief, guilt, happiness, grief, dread, swirling about to name which one was strongest.  
  
“I’m sorry,” He snuffled into her hair. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t protect you, I didn’t save you.”  
  
“It’s okay. You did what you could.”  
  
Jean untangled herself from his arms, pushing lightly on his chest until he lay back onto the bed. She pressed her hand to his forehead the way he had after her nightmare the week before last.  
  
The week before last. Nine days had passed, but it felt like an eternity.  
  
Charles covered her hand with his own and studied her intently. Whatever it felt like, he knew this couldn’t possibly be real.  
  
“Stay strong,” Jean said. “He knows that your abilities are powerful, but in every other respect, he thinks you’re weak. Show him that he’s wrong.”  
  
When he woke, Charles could still feel her palm on his head, warm and comforting. Whether it was a dream or a hallucination, he had no idea.  
  
Madness, it seemed, was becoming his new normal.  
  
[---]  
  
“I have a gift for you, Charles.”  
  
“I don’t want it.”  
  
“You don’t even know what it is.” En Sabah Nur said, feigning hurt.  
  
“I don’t want anything from you.”  
  
“Hmm,” En Sabah Nur hummed as he stalked around the chair that Charles was currently occupying.  
  
There were several rooms in the pyramid that mimicked spaces from actual homes; bedrooms, dining areas, libraries, and such. Charles was regularly, overtly blunt with En Sabah Nur, but he never went quite so far as to suggest that maybe this was his human side craving variety and entertainment. Charles found the library to be a suitable distraction, perhaps even necessary to stop him from completely snapping under the strain of everything that had happened.  
  
“Maybe I won’t tell you what it is, then,” En Sabah Nur suggested. “Maybe I will let you figure it out what it is in your own time.”  
  
He circled around until he was standing to Charles’s left, far back enough to be just out of view. Charles’s heart-rate picked up, and any hope that the ‘gift’ in question would be some (relatively speaking) benign trinket was quickly flooding away.  
  
At first, he thought it was nerves: Having a genocidal maniac with delusions of godhood standing behind you is fairly stressful. But when the twisting sensation in his stomach gave way to a considerable aching, Charles began to realize that he was receiving whatever nightmare of a gift En Sabah Nur had seen fit to bestow upon him.  
  
It was uncomfortable, painful, but neither the pain nor the nausea ever crossed any significant thresholds. It felt like the sort of cramping one might get during a particularly aggressive bout of the stomach flu, lasted all of two minutes, and then disappeared. Charles did not scream or cry from it, merely doubled-over until the last pangs had disappeared.  
  
“What did you do?” He croaked as he slowly began to straighten up.  
  
En Sabah Nur knelt down before him the way he had before, and lightly pressed his fingers under Charles’s chin. Charles did not like the smile on his face. “You will see, Charles. In time, I will help you see.”  
  
[---]  
  
Not two days later, Psylocke found a survivor.  
  
En Sabah Nur was still shielding his Horsemen’s minds against Charles, a sort of subtle reinforcement of what Jean had said: He may have thought Charles was weak in conviction, in his physicality, but he knew better than to underestimate the power of Charles’s mind.  
  
All the same, even without his powers Charles had detected a cruelty to Psylocke that he didn’t in Storm or Angel. They did what they did out of loyalty to En Sabah Nur, not necessarily because they enjoyed it. But Psylocke- there was a glint in her eye, a twist to her lips that indicated she was getting more out of this than just the pleasure of serving her master.  
  
The oldest mutant was not in the habit of leaving Charles to his own devices for extended periods of time. Charles suspected this was more a concern as to what he might get up to if left unattended rather than any genuine concern for his social health. As it was, he was with En Sabah Nur and Angel whilst the latter was recapping his foray in Michigan when Psylocke returned.  
  
She didn’t even say anything at first, sauntering up to the three of them in complete silence, waiting for Angel to finish. Charles could tell from the little smirk teasing her lips that something had happened.  
  
When Angel was finished and En Sabah Nur turned to acknowledge her, the smirk grew until it was positively frightening. She said only one word:  
  
“Found one.”  
  
He was mid-teens, with black hair and blue eyes that stared up at En Sabah Nur in terror. “Tko si ti?”  
  
En Sabah Nur knelt down and gently lifted the boy’s face by the chin with a finger. “Ja sam Bog.” To Psylocke, he said, “He’s human.”  
  
“He is,” Psylocke agreed. Charles swallowed thickly when he saw her thumb stroking the hilt of her sword. He had seen her in action before, all fluid grace that made her brutality seem like an intricate dance. A practiced flick of the wrist and the sixth known survivor of this apocalypse would be missing his head.  
  
Charles didn’t have to read her mind to know exactly what she was hoping she would be allowed to do.  
  
If En Sabah Nur understood- and he probably did- he did not say. He turned back to the boy. “Bojiš li se?”  
  
The boy didn’t respond for a moment, glancing from him to Psylocke, to Angel, and finally to Charles. Their gazes locked; he must have sensed that Charles was the only one in the room genuinely concerned about his well-being.  
  
“Dječak,” En Sabah Nur prodded with the same, eerie patience he addressed everyone else with. “Bojiš li se?”  
  
The boy looked back to En Sabah Nur, breathing shallowly. “Da,” He croaked, nodding. “Da, gospodine.”  
  
En Sabah Nur was silent for a solid minute. “Charles,” He said, finally, without taking his eyes from the boy. “You are an expert in genetics. What would you say this boy’s chances are for producing mutant children?”  
  
What sort of fucking question was that? Charles was psychic and knowledgeable about genetics, but for Christ’s sake, he couldn’t see the bloody future.  
  
Still, he realized with no small amount of distress that his answer would likely determine whether or not this young man lived or died.  
  
“There’s a… Quite reasonable possibility, especially if paired with another mutant.” Charles was careful to make his tone quietly optimistic. What he’s said isn’t a lie- there is a very decent chance that, if paired with a mutant, a mutant child would be produced. Erik was a prime example; he had had two mutant children by two separate non-mutant women.  
  
En Sabah Nur considered the words for a moment, and then turned back to the boy, a benign smile on his face. “Čestitam, mladiću,” He said, “Imate svrhu.”  
  
The boy did not look comforted.  
  
It wasn’t until the next day that Charles worked up the nerve to ask.  
  
“Where did you put him?”  
  
“Hmm?” En Sabah Nur hummed.  
  
“The boy, from yesterday. Where is he?”  
  
En Sabah Nur chuckled. “So protective, aren’t you, Charles? Does he remind you of your students?’  
  
The sound of Scott's panicked cries for Hank, Jean's screaming echoed through his head. He felt their fear, their pain, and his own agonizing sense of loss when he could no longer feel their minds. Their young, innocent minds, dead far before their time.  
  
“ _Fuck_ you,” Charles snarled, before he could stop himself.  
  
There were moments when he forgot just how many powers En Sabah Nur had amassed over the years. One of them, it seemed, was some degree of super-speed, because the other mutant was standing directly in front of Charles, hands braced on the armrests of his wheelchair, before Charles even had time to think.  
  
Bravery and anger abruptly gave way to fear. En Sabah Nur’s face was utterly emotionless, and it was difficult to tell how badly the line had been crossed, or the severity of whatever punishment he was about to inflict would be. In contrast, though Charles tried not to show it, some of the fear and uncertainty in his face must have undoubtedly shone through.  
  
En Sabah Nur had never been quite _this_ close to him before, their faces maybe an inch or two apart. It was unsettling to look into his eyes and see how utterly normal they looked, a dark shade of brown, compared to the rest of him. The realization might have made the would-be god a little less frightening if not for the circumstances.  
  
After a moment, En Sabah Nur spoke. “He has a purpose, Charles,” He said slowly, enunciating every syllable carefully. “As I have found one for you.”  
  
Charles swallowed. “That purpose being?”  
  
The smirk on En Sabah Nur’s face was disturbingly reminiscent of Psylocke’s, and it sent a chill down Charles’s spine. “I have business to attend to tonight. But I intend to show you your purpose, and quite soon. As I said before: You will see.”  
  
Charles broke into a cold sweat, and began to wonder, again, how viable jumping out a window might be as an escape from this nightmare.  
  
[---]  
  
The summons came the next day.  
  
_“Come to me, Charles.”_  
  
The words echoed in Charles’s head.  
  
He could have: En Sabah Nur had returned his wheelchair to him, and every floor in the pyramid was traversable by wheelchair (realizing that the new post-apocalyptic world was wheelchair accessible made Charles laugh in a way that was not entirely stable). But no, Charles did not come. He was not a dog who answered to a master’s beck and call. He was not so broken yet.  
  
In any case, he had a terrible, gut-wrenching feeling that he was about to learn his “purpose” and the longer he staved off that conversation (and God-knew what else that would come with it), the better. The last time En Sabah Nur had told him that he had a purpose, it involved being tied to a slab and nearly having the other mutant take over his body.  
  
No, Charles remained right where he was, sitting on his bed, eyes fixated on the pages of his book, even if he couldn’t focus enough to read it right at the moment. There was a fine difference between snarking quietly at En Sabah Nur’s back when he spoke and outright defying him, and Charles had just crossed it.  
  
The sound of a portal opening near the doorway made Charles tense, his grip on the book turning to iron.  
  
“Your obstinacy is charming, Charles,” En Sabah Nur’s voice lacked some of that calm and cool quality that it usually had when dealing with him. “Amusing, even. But only up to a point.”  
  
He strode over to the bed, the portal disappearing behind him. Not a good sign. Charles took a deep breath, and forced himself to look at his book again. “You’ve made it clear you’ve no intention to kill me. So I don’t see any point in making your life any easier when all you plan to do is make mine miserable.”  
  
And again, En Sabah Nur moved so quickly that Charles barely had time to react before he was slammed down onto the pillows with considerably more force than was necessary. The ancient mutant straddled him, hand pressing so forcefully onto his chest that Charles was having trouble breathing.  
  
“The time has come, it seems,” En Sabah Nur leaned down and breathed into his ear. “for me to put you in your place. Your purpose for continuing to exist in my new world will become clear soon, Charles.”  
  
He leaned down and bit down on Charles’ shoulder, and it became clear what was about to happen.  
  
Charles’s mind went blank with panic. He could fight. He could bite, scratch, and scream.  
  
But what would be the point? What would be the point in resisting?  
  
Charles was alone. No one was going to come and save him from this. Resistance would undoubtedly lead to En Sabah Nur enacting some sort of punishment far worse than this; he had seen what the man had done to end Hank and Scott’s lives. Charles shuddered to remember it.  
  
He was afraid, damn it; he was afraid of what was to come, and he was afraid of what En Sabah Nur would do if he refused. He fluctuated between that profound fear and a startling absence of it on a regular basis. Sometimes he wanted to die, and he meant it; other times, like right now, the prospect terrified him, and he hated that he couldn’t overcome his fear to face the inevitable.  
  
This couldn’t possibly be described as a _life._  
  
En Sabah Nur took him without gentleness, but nor did he take him with any particular brutality, which was what Charles had been expecting. For a man who was so utterly intent on portraying himself as a god in the flesh, his mannerisms during this particular encounter seemed to imply he had considerable sexual experience.  
  
Charles, for his part, had no interest in reciprocating or even processing what was happening. He laid still and shut his eyes, digging his fingers into the blanket on the bed and trying, in vain, to pretend that he was in his own bed in New York and everything that had happened in the last few weeks was simply a dreadful nightmare.  
  
_Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump._  
  
He imagined that his students were safe and peaceful and asleep in their beds as well.  
  
_Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump._  
  
He pictured Erik in Poland with his wife and daughter, all alive and well.  
  
_Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump._  
  
Raven getting on well with Hank again.  
  
_Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump._  
  
Moira with her young son, watching him grow up.  
  
_Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump._  
  
Safe. Safe and happy at ho-  
  
Charles gasped, hands scrambling for renewed purchase on the bed. The angle of the thrusts had changed; whether he liked it or not, it felt good now, and his body evidently didn’t care much if his mind wasn’t pleased with the situation.  
  
_So this is my purpose,_ he thought bitterly, after En Sabah Nur had wrung an unfortunate orgasm from Charles and then finished himself off.  
  
**_Entertainment._**  
  
[---]  
  
That night, Erik visited him.  
  
“My friend,” Erik whispered, eyes as sad as Jean’s had been. “Oh, my dear, dear friend. I am sorry.”  
  
Charles couldn’t move. His stomach was a mass of pressure and pain, and had been since En Sabah Nur had left. He grasped Erik’s hand tightly as tears streamed down his cheeks. “Erik,” He sighed shakily. “Erik, come here. Please, please.”  
  
Erik lay down next to him, and Charles clung to him like a child, burying his face in his shirt.  
  
“I’m here,” Erik said, arms wrapped around Charles’s back. “You’re not alone, Charles.” It didn’t escape Charles’s notice that he’d repeated what Charles had said to him that night they first met, gagging on water.  
  
At his weakest, Charles wished that Erik hadn’t turned on En Sabah Nur at the last moment, wished that he had stayed right on the course of destruction instead of doing what was right; because if he had, at least Charles wouldn’t be completely and terribly alone. It was a terribly selfish thought, but not untrue.  
  
Especially not now.  
  
[---]  
  
  
For the next few weeks, Charles kept his mouth shut.  
  
He did not go out of his way to please or humor En Sabah Nur, but nor did he defy him as directly as he did before. _This isn’t breaking,_ Charles told himself, _I’m not broken, not yet. This is taking caution to avoid anything like- like **that** happening again._  
  
It was denial, really. He knew En Sabah Nur would do it again. He knew he had no ability to resist without something worse happening to him. That was why he flinched when the mutant called to him now, wondering every time if maybe he was about to get a repeat of the other night.  
  
En Sabah Nur said nothing of the incident. Made no mention of it, subtle or not. The only difference seemed to be the way he looked at Charles: Every time the telepath was in full view of him now, Charles could feel En Sabah Nur’s eyes fixed on him. And when he turned to look back, the ancient mutant _continued_ staring, eyes roaming over him with an almost… _Searching_ quality. Like he was looking for something.  
  
For what, Charles could only guess. Weakness? A sign that maybe he was successfully chipping away at what remained of Charles’s sanity?  
  
Well, fuck him. Charles wasn’t going to give him the pleasure.  
  
[---]  
  
A ghastly, agonized scream split the air, and Charles jumped.  
  
The scream was male, definitely, and there were only two men other than him in the area who would scream like that (certainly not En Sabah Nur).  
  
It was coming from outside. It took Charles time to descend to ground-level from where he was, and he found himself becoming exhausted a bit faster than before, a bit nauseous from the effort. A floor above his destination, he had to stop for a moment, panting. At home, before everything had gone to hell, he’d been very active between classes and checking up on students and traveling. Since the end of the known world, it seemed he had spent too much time stationary, lost his ability to move as efficiently as he used to; he even seemed to have gained a bit of weight.  
  
“Oh, maybe I’ll ask the bastard to build a bloody gym,” He grunted, finally forcing himself to get his chair moving again. “I think I’m entitled to the odd request if he’s going to be using me as a fucking sex-doll.”  
  
Finally, he reached the bottom of the pyramid and rolled himself to the door.  
  
En Sabah Nur and Psylocke were standing several feet beyond the doorway, looking down at something Charles couldn’t see.  
  
Psylocke shrugged, but the expression on her face was one of careful respect. She was far too bright to get flippant with En Sabah Nur. Unlike Charles, she didn’t have a death-wish. “He tried to escape.”  
  
En Sabah Nur let out a long, slow breath. “Psylocke,” He chided her with a tone one might use with a naughty child, “You mustn’t kill the survivors. We need them, human or not.”  
  
Psylocke actually had the decency to look genuinely chastised. “Sorry.”  
  
Charles’s blood ran cold.  
  
Despite the screaming instincts in his head telling him to stay still, that they hadn’t noticed him there and that was better, he wheeled himself outside of the pyramid, deliberately positioning himself on Psylocke’s side. He looked down the small hill that had prevented him from seeing-  
  
No.  
  
Oh, oh no.  
  
It was the boy.  
  
Charles had seen Psylocke fight before. He knew what she was capable of. And he could only guess that she had used that strange, purple energy she produced to create a whip, like she had done when she’d fought Hank. A whip that she had then wrapped around this boy’s neck.  
  
Except that unlike Hank, this boy was human. He was not nearly as sturdy as Hank’s mutation had made him, not nearly as strong. When she’d curled her whip around his neck, it had decapitated him. It must have been sudden, because his eyes were still open wide with the same terror he’d regarded En Sabah Nur with when he’d first been captured.  
  
Charles leaned over the side of his chair and threw up.  
  
[---]  
  
As coincidence would have it, they found more survivors.  
  
_Mutant_ survivors.  
  
This time it was Angel who found them. All of them were from East Germany: A man in his early thirties who had a moderate sense of precognition; he’d get sharp, fast flashes of potential events to occur over the next twenty-four hours.  
  
His daughter, a fourteen year-old with dark red eyes, could manipulate gravity.  
  
Lastly was a man in his mid-twenties, unrelated to the previous two. His was an unusual ability; one could call it the exact opposite of Raven’s: He could change _other_ peoples’ appearances.  
  
Charles only knew all of this because Angel had told him. He sounded positively eager to relate all of this to someone, but Charles was the first one he found after En Sabah Nur. “I mean, I figured that other mutants survived, but I didn’t figure I’d find three in one day. Hell, there have been times I was worried we were gonna find _any_.”  
  
“You think maybe ripping apart the earth at the seams had something to do with that?” Charles remarked dryly.  
  
Angel froze for a split-second, and it was a startling reminder that while they were equally culpable in the destruction of the world and the billions of lives within it, Angel and Storm weren’t of the same mindset at En Sabah Nur. Charles was still convinced that En Sabah Nur’s ability to enhance their powers did something to affect their minds as well; the brief peak he’d taken into Erik’s mind had shown him something was wrong, and these tiny, brief flashes of uncertainty and guilt from Angel and Storm were enough to alert him that maybe there was more to it than rage and anger.  
  
More to it than their _own_ , anyway.  
  
“The world needed to be changed. It was shit before.”  
  
“Yes, I can see the difference: Six-billion people before, maybe nine now? Oh, I’m sorry, that’s eight now, isn’t it? Did you see Psylocke’s handy-work outside, or did En Sabah Nur make what was left of that boy’s body disappear?”  
  
For a fraction of a second, Angel looked well and truly guilty. Then he hardened again.  
  
“I don’t know why you’re so bitter. He was human. What did they ever do but fuck with us?”  
  
“Create us. Raise us. Befriend us. Marry us. Accepted us.” Charles listed off without hesitation. “Unless of course you only choose to count the bastards of the world who did us harm? I suppose it is so much easier to ignore the countless humans who never did a single bad thing to you, isn’t it?”  
  
Now Angel looked angry. But although Charles’s telepathy remained blocked for the most part, he could detect wisps of emotion here and there; and right now, there was just enough anger and shame coming from Angel to reinforce Charles’s theory about En Sabah Nur’s powers and their effect on one’s personality.  
  
“You don’t get it.”  
  
“Erik told me the same thing, and even he changed his mind.”  
  
It wasn’t as though any of this mattered, though.  
  
There was hardly anyone left in the world, mutant or human alike, to make much of a difference.  
  
[---]  
  
“Are you going to kill these ones if they escape?”  
  
En Sabah Nur sighed in a way that Charles was beginning to associate with any questions that had to do with morally dubious decisions.  
  
“It was not me who killed that boy, Charles. You know quite well it was Psylocke.”  
  
“Where are they going, anyway? I don’t see them training with the others, I don’t see them around the pyramid, so I have to assume they’re being kept somewhere. What exactly do you plan on using them for?”  
  
“That is none of your concern.”  
  
“But they will be _used_ for something.”  
  
“Everyone has a purpose, Charles.”  
  
If it wasn’t for fighting (what would they need to fight, the world had been nearly wiped clean of everyone and everything), and they weren’t being used for tasks or labor around the pyramid, then what the hell else-  
  
Oh.  
  
Oh, fuck no.  
  
“Jesus Christ,” Charles whispered. Then, louder as he turned his chair to face the other mutant, “They’re fucking _breeding stock,_ aren’t they?”  
  
“I cannot bestow immortality, Charles. If the world is to continue, there must be new blood.” En Sabah Nur said those last words in a particularly pointed way, but if there was some hidden message Charles was supposed to be divining from it, he was too disgusted to even try. He covered his eyes with a hand and tried to wrap his mind around the idea that the bastard had wiped everyone off the face of the earth, and was now planning on repopulating it by forcing people to mate like fucking _cattle._  
  
What the _fuck_ sort of world would this be in another five years? Ten? Fifty? One-hundred?  
  
_Well,_ Charles thought with some grim satisfaction, _the more people there are, the more likely he is to be betrayed. Without my powers, he’s every bit as vulnerable to betrayal as he was before. I just hope to God I get to see it before I go._  
  
Suddenly, he felt En Sabah Nur staring at him again. Charles took his hand away from his face and glared wearily at him. “Why are you doing that? Why do you keep staring at me?” _Why do you keep looking like you’re **looking** for something while you do it?_ That bit he left out. He could have asked; maybe he should have. But there was part of him that was afraid of the answer.  
  
En Sabah Nur sighed once more, rising from his chair. A flick of his hand sent the book in front of him flying neatly back onto the shelf. “You ask so many questions.”  
  
“What in the hell else is there to do around here? You destroyed the fucking world, remember?” Charles snapped.  
  
“You’re bored, then?”  
  
Oh _shit_. Damn it. Damn, damn, damn. He should have kept his mouth shut, _fuck_.  
  
Right on cue, a portal opened up behind En Sabah Nur. “Then we must find something for you to do.” He beckoned Charles with a finger. “Come.”  
  
Charles hesitated, weighing his options… And then, with resignation, he slowly rolled towards En Sabah Nur and the portal. “Tell me,” he asked dully as the purple energy encompassed them. “What use does a _god_ have for something as carnal and _human_ as sex?”  
  
En Sabah Nur chuckled. “It has its uses, Charles, I assure you.”  
  
He said nothing more, and Charles was in no mood to prod.  
  
[---]  
  
Something was wrong.  
  
Lately, Charles had begun to feel god-awful. It wasn’t a cold that came and went in the usual fashion; it wasn’t a stomach-bug that made him miserable for a day and then disappeared.  
  
This was constant nausea, rising and abating but never actually going away. He was throwing up at least three times a day. Eating was becoming difficult. There was dizziness too- whether it was caused by the nausea or something else was unclear. All Charles knew was that at any given moment, his world would spin and he would come dangerously close to falling out of his wheelchair. And vomiting again.  
  
That it was ongoing meant one of two things: It was some sort of illness or injury that was getting worse (he couldn’t help but nervously recall En Sabah Nur’s “gift” those several weeks back) or it was stress. He was finally getting ready to snap, and overwhelming stress was causing the symptoms.  
  
That being said, Charles didn’t make so much as a peep about the symptoms to anyone. He had no cause to speak to Angel (who disliked him), Storm (who he barely knew), or Psylocke (who would probably laugh like the blood-thirsty maniac he continued to suspect she was). That left only one person, and fuck if Charles was going to say anything until he was forced.  
  
‘Forced’, as it happened, came when En Sabah Nur attempted to summon him again.  
  
_Charles, come to me._  
  
Charles, as it was, was lying completely still on his bed, having just come off of a vomiting jag and didn’t trust himself to move, or even talk without it starting up all over again.  
  
_I can’t._  
  
There was no response.  
  
A moment later, a portal opened in the middle of his room. Christ, but he wished this bastard could learn to take ‘no’ for an answer when he heard it. He better not try anything, or it’d be his own bloody fault when Charles threw up on him.  
  
…On second thought, that wouldn’t be too horrible, now would it? Maybe Charles would even get a laugh out of it.  
  
“I don’t feel well.”  
  
“Yes, I can see that.”  
  
En Sabah Nur paced around to the side of the bed, and then reached down to touch Charles’s stomach. Charles shrunk away, wincing. “Don’t. I’ll throw up.”  
  
“You won’t.” God, but if there was anything he hated about this fucking delusional bastard of a mutant, it was how utterly self-assured he was. He wanted so badly for somebody, something, to prove him _wrong._  
  
Whatever En Sabah Nur was doing, it was non-invasive, because Charles stomach remained undisturbed. “Can I go back to sleep? I feel like shit, and I’ve no interest in whatever you plan on doing to me today.”  
  
“Shh.” En Sabah Nur hushed. His eyes had gone white in that way they did when he used his powers. As badly as Charles just wanted to shut his eyes and go back to sleep, the idea of letting his guard down to such an extent when he was still in the room did nothing to calm his stomach. Over the next few minutes a small, unsettling smirk settled on En Sabah Nur’s face. “It would seem, Charles,” He said, “that my gift to you is finally coming to fruition.”  
  
“And what the fuck does that mean? No riddles, please, I swear to fucking God I can’t do the cryptic bullshit right now. Just tell me what the fuck you mean.” Charles growled, curling in on himself when En Sabah Nur took his hand away.  
  
The ancient mutant looked down at him. “Well, it’s rather simple,” He said. “You miss your students, Charles. You miss having your children to teach and love. And as I have said, I cannot grant immortality to those living. There must be new blood.”  
  
The intellectual part of Charles’s mind understood what was being said immediately. But somehow- perhaps it was the sheer oddity of it, perhaps it was an attempt to protect him, give him a chance to prepare for it when it finally hit- the realization took about four minutes, all spent in complete silence, for the message to be transmitted, in its entirety, to the forefront of his mind.  
  
When it did, it flashed only briefly- and then his mind went terribly, ominously blank.  
  
“What are you saying?” Shock had rendered his tone utterly devoid of emotion. It was too overwhelming to dedicate any sort of energy to power a more profound reaction to this… This…  
  
“Come now, Charles,” En Sabah Nur purred, taking a seat on the edge of the bed. “You’re an intelligent man. The answer is quite clear, I think.”  
  
And, in the event it was not, he settled his hand down onto Charles’s stomach again to dispel any confusion.  
  
Charles stared at him for a long time.  
  
“That’s not even physically possible.” He said flatly.  
  
En Sabah Nur rolled his eyes. “Charles,” He clucked. “I made Angel’s wings into steel. Do you really think that’s _all_ I’m capable of doing?”  
  
No, but Charles had always assumed that En Sabah Nur’s powers involved affecting existing mutations, amplifying the things that were already _there,_ not a person’s anatomy in general. En Sabah Nur had gathered countless powerful mutant followers over centuries; it made sense that the backbone of his powers involved manipulating mutations. But he wasn’t aware that he could actually put things there that hadn’t been there previous, like- like-  
  
Charles was suddenly overcome with dizziness.  
  
“I- I need to sleep. I can’t- I just-”  
  
“That might be for the best.” En Sabah Nur agreed, and Charles was too shell-shocked to even be angry at the smugness in his voice.  
  
Jesus. Jesus Christ.  
  
He was-  
  
He couldn’t even _think_ it.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Charles goes on a really, really bad trip.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Boy, I pulled an all-nighter to complete this. Still, I'm proud of the word-count; I out-paced my last 3,000 words+ story by about 4,000 words.

That night, Raven visited him.  
  
“Charles,” Unlike Jean and Erik, the sadness in her voice was quieter, less noticeable. She looked down towards his stomach, then back up at him. “Shit, Charles.”  
  
Charles laughed, and even to his ears there was a sort of unhinged quality to it. “I’m dreaming. This has to be a dream.”  
  
“Of course it’s a dream. I’m dead.”  
  
“No, I mean- that’s obvious. I mean everything else. I can’t possibly be-” He couldn’t finish.  
  
Raven curled up next to him the way she used to before, whether after a nightmare or while listening to him read. It made his eyes burn, remembering the comfort they’d given each other over the years, reassuring each other they weren’t alone.  
  
“I think I might join you, soon.”  
  
Raven’s head jerked up, staring at him in alarm. She opened her mouth like she meant to dissuade him, like there was some sort of argument for living in the world he was currently forced to endure. But then the alarm faded into grim acceptance. “Can’t say I blame you,” She said finally.  
  
“I can’t take it anymore, Raven. I can’t handle living like this. I’m alone, I’m surrounded by genocidal maniacs, and now I’m…”  
  
“Do what I did, Charles,” She said, nuzzling her head into his shoulder.  
  
“What’s that?”  
  
“What you have to. Do what you have to: No more, no less.”  
  
[---]  
  
He changed the windows.  
  
He changed the windows, that cock-sucking shit-eating rapist mother of a-  
  
“ _Damn it!_ ” Charles barked, swinging out and punching the wall hard enough to send a shooting pain up his arm.  
  
The windows were higher now than they’d been before the more obvious symptoms of his… Condition had manifested. It had been nearly two weeks since he’d been out of bed, unable to overcome the nausea. En Sabah Nur must have divined that this latest bit of bullshit might be the straw that broke the camel’s back, and that maybe Charles would take things into his own hands.  
  
Problem was, there weren’t a terrible many methods available to Charles if he wanted to end his life quickly and immediately. Strangulation of some sort would be too slow; he would go into distress before he died, and since he and En Sabah Nur were still “connected” to some small extent, there was an overwhelming chance that the would-be god would sense that he was dying and intervene.  
  
He didn’t have access to anything sufficiently sharp (that was from the get-go, probably to discourage him from stabbing En Sabah Nur in a fit of rage). In theory he could make his own sufficiently sharp object, but then there was the timeliness issue; it would take time to fashion such an object, and En Sabah Nur seemed to have a sixth sense for knowing when Charles was hiding something from him, especially since there really wasn’t much to _hide_ nowadays.  
  
The only other quick option would be a gun. And obviously, there were none of those lying around. Jumping was the only method left available to him.  
  
Maybe… Maybe he could try to reach the window. Maybe it wasn’t as out-of-reach as he thought.  
  
Charles took a deep breath, and then made a grab for the window.  
  
The lunge was powerful enough that he _almost_ got there; but instead, he missed and landed hard on his side on the stone floor with a shout. Charles grimaced, rolling onto his back and glaring up at the window.  
  
Well, at least he hadn’t landed on his stomach. Wouldn’t want to damage the fucking hell-spawn, now would we?  
  
“Xavier?” Storm was standing at the end of the hallway, brow furrowed. He didn’t know if she’d seen what just transpired or not, but really, what did it matter, even if she told En Sabah Nur? Charles hadn’t exactly been subtle about his desire to die. He’d made it graphically clear from the get-go. “Are you hurt?”  
  
“What do you care?” Charles snapped in return.  
  
But he regretted the harshness of his tone when he saw hurt flash through her eyes. Really, she wasn’t much older than Jean or Scott had been. She was still very much a child too. Still, she had been complicit in the deaths of billions of people, same as Angel, and had yet to show any regret for that decision. Charles wasn’t going to just pretend that that didn’t bother him.  
  
“Why were you trying to reach the window?” She asked as he hauled his wheelchair towards him.  
  
So frustrated and disappointed from his attempt, Charles didn’t bother censoring himself. “I was going to chuck myself out of it.”  
  
Storm’s eyes widened. “Why… Would you do that?”  
  
“Because I’m pregnant.”  
  
It was the first time he’d said it out loud, and it came with surprising ease this time. Maybe because he just couldn’t bring himself to give a fuck about anything right now, up to and including the shock and horror over his current predicament.  
  
Storm stared at him bizarrely. Oh yes, if she wasn’t thinking it before, she definitely thought he was off his rocker now. “What?”  
  
“Pregnant,” Charles repeated flatly, situating himself into his chair with a grunt and pointing towards his stomach, which had definitely distended beyond its normal contours. “En Sabah Nur’s doing. You know, that thing where someone fucks you and you-”  
  
“I _know_ how babies are made, I’m not stupid,” Storm rolled her eyes, and Charles’s heart clenched- she looked like Jubilee when she did that. “I just can’t figure out how _he_ made one with _you._ ”  
  
“You’ll have to get in line, I’m afraid. I haven’t the foggiest idea how he did it either.”  
  
[---]  
  
Days crept by.  
  
Every now and then Charles would glance down and realize that the curve to his stomach was a bit more pronounced than before. He tried desperately not to think about the future; about actually _having_ the child, whether or not it would even _be_ a child considering who its- well- _other_ father was. He methodically plucked through books in the library, trying to distract himself.  
  
A few more survivors were found in America (Three women, two of which were mutants) and Korea (a human baby girl, two human men, and a mutant woman). Their powers were as of yet unknown because like with the others, Charles did not see them, ever. With En Sabah Nur still blocking his telepathy, he had no way to locate or communicate with them.  
  
He was grimly concerned about how En Sabah Nur’s “Repopulate the Earth” plan was going to unfold. Was he going to force himself on the survivors like he did Charles, or would he force them to interbreed amongst themselves?  
  
If there were any other survivors on this wrecked planet of theirs, he sincerely hoped they had the good sense to stay hidden and not be tempted out of their safe places by young girls or angels.  
  
This hope was furthered by the sound of vomiting that did not belong to him.  
  
Finding Psylocke vomiting into a waste-bin was a surreal experience; much like with any intimidating figure, seeing her in any sort of distress or vulnerability felt unnatural. What felt considerably more natural was the piercing, burning glare she gave him when she realized he’d seen.  
  
“Are you alright?” Charles ventured, more out of some lingering desire to not let his manners go stale. Unmonitored, he could easily (and often did) become every bit the asshole that his roommates in the post-apocalyptic hell-pyramid were.  
  
“Fuck off.”  
  
“Right-o.” Charles turned to go- but then, the wires of his brain made several spontaneous connections at once, and it took a surprising lack of effort to come to a conclusion about this: “Why are you sick?”  
  
Psylocke squinted at him. “What?”  
  
“Why are you sick? Stomach bug? Something else?”  
  
“Ugh.” The tone said ‘I’m done with you’, but the brief flash of alarm and discomfort in her eyes said-  
  
“You’re pregnant, aren’t you?”  
  
“You don’t even have your telepathy, how the _fuck_ did you-?”  
  
“With _who?_ ”  
  
Psylocke glared at him. “None of your business.”  
  
“Not En Sabah Nur?” Charles pressed on. Maybe pressing on with this morbid curiosity wasn’t the best idea in the world, but what else did he have to do with his time? In any case, Psylocke couldn’t afford to lose her temper with him. If she did something, Charles had a feeling En Sabah Nur would be a little more miffed than he’d been about that young man.  
  
She let out a bark of a laugh. “En Sabah Nur? And me? Please. Like he would-” She stopped, sending a less-than-inconspicuous glance down at his stomach. “Not with me, no.”  
  
“Angel, then?” Psylocke rolled her eyes. He took it as confirmation. “It’s not a difficult guess, darling, there are only seven known men left on the bloody planet and of them, you’ve only had extended contact with two, one of which you’ve outright denied being involved with.”  
  
Psylocke sniffed. She still looked a little green, but either she was much better at steeling herself than Charles was, or she was experiencing a lighter day of nausea. He’d almost feel bad for her if he didn’t remember the whole ‘participating in mass genocide, plus the murder of my friends and a young boy’.  
  
“My advice to you,” Charles said dryly as he turned his chair around to go, “take a month’s worth of sick days, because you and that waste-bin are going to become good friends.”  
  
Psylocke growled something as his back that sounded distinctly like ‘fuck you’.  
  
[---]  
  
Waking up in the middle of the night had become commonplace.  
  
If it wasn’t the nightmares, it was the vomiting. If it wasn’t the vomiting, it was the constant, unsettling feeling that he wasn’t in his own room, and that the silence of the world wasn’t brought on by his own attempts to contain his powers.  
  
On this particular night, Charles thought it was a vomiting jag starting up- dread overcame him, and he got ready to haul himself into his wheelchair and make for the lavatory- but after a moment, he realized it wasn’t nausea, just…  
  
What was that?  
  
It wasn’t nausea, wasn’t discomfort, it felt like…  
  
Movement. Oh fuck, it was movement.  
  
Charles’s mind raced as he tried to gather every bit of information on pregnancy he had available to him. Admittedly, he was lacking; it had never been a relevant subject to him, and he’d been desperate enough to pretend that this wasn’t fucking happening to him that he hadn’t read up on it lately.  
  
From what little he knew… Was this normal? It didn’t feel normal. This didn’t feel like a _little_ movement, befitting a fetus of some four months; it felt like something bigger, more obvious. Combined with the degree and speed with which his stomach had extended, there was no way this was following typical fetal development.  
  
Another movement.  
  
And this time, the skin of his stomach pushed outward slightly.  
  
Charles had the sudden, irrational urge to find something, anything sharp, and to cut. He wanted it out of him. He wanted it out and gone and away from him without ever having looked at it, so that he wouldn’t have to see whatever sort of abomination of a creature En Sabah Nur was capable of spawning. He wanted no part of it.  
  
What he wanted was to wake up.  
  
He wanted to wake up out of this fucking nightmare, find himself in his own bed, and go check on his students. He wanted to see Jean and Scott and Kurt sleeping peacefully in their beds, he wanted to find Hank tinkering with that bloody plane, he wanted to call Raven and Erik and Moira and make sure they were safe.  
  
In moments like these, when the cognitive dissonance of what he could handle versus what he was being put through was tearing him apart, that Charles felt dangerously close to madness. If he did not die, if his body did not break, then his mind would.  
  
It was still moving.  
  
“Stop it,” he growled, squeezing his eyes shut, “ _Stop._ ” He pulled his pillow over his head so that he wouldn’t have to see his stomach.  
  
Charles didn’t sleep for the rest of the night.  
  
[---]  
  
“How goes it, Charles?”  
  
“I hate everything, but especially you.”  
  
“Glowing with health, then.”  
  
No, not even close. Charles’s back was killing him. His head was pounding from lack of sleep. His stomach was unsettled, though whether that was a natural side-effect of the pregnancy or his own stress was unclear. He was exhausted, he was in pain, and he was irritable.  
  
It was a bad day waiting to happen.  
  
They were in the throne-room, the same place where En Sabah Nur had nearly taken Charles’s body for his own. Charles was beginning to wish that the transference had worked, if only so that his consciousness would have departed into the beyond and left all of this bullshit behind. Occasionally En Sabah Nur liked to bring Charles there to speak, or listen to his generals’ reports on their hunt for survivors.  
  
“Come now, Charles, I would think the prospect of having new blood would excite you. You are a teacher, after all.”  
  
Charles wasn’t even going to dignify that with an answer. The bastard knew damn well how much agony he’d caused Charles in that respect.  
  
“And you did such a good job at teaching them to control their powers. The girl with the red hair- Jean? What a pretty child. So _powerful_ , too. Such a shame she had to die.”  
  
Charles was being baited and he fucking knew it. It didn’t take too much to figure out that Charles’s relationship with Jean had been close, given their similar abilities; no doubt En Sabah Nur had gleaned that from his first look into Charles’s mind all those months ago in Cerebro.  
  
“And the boy, Scott: I’ve never seen a mutation like his before. In all previous cases the mutant had control over the energy, but him… Well, he was clearly lacking in that, wasn’t he?”  
  
Charles felt a sharp stab of pain when his tooth met his lip, and began to taste blood in his mouth.  
  
“And although she was pathetically weak, _Raven_ had quite the-”  
  
“Fuck you.” Charles hissed. “Fuck you, fuck your _world,_ and fuck your mad delusions of godhood. And go on, have a go at me for saying it- You went through all that trouble to put your fucking spawn in me, I have to assume you’re not going to do anything that would cause it to die.”  
  
It was almost as though they’d entered a vacuum. Sound seemed to cease in its entirety. For a split second, Charles wondered if En Sabah Nur was doing something; but no, the mutant’s eyes were their normal color, no indication whatsoever that he was utilizing his powers.  
  
No, it was just dead-fucking-silent.  
  
There was a small, subtle indication that Charles had crossed a line: En Sabah Nur had slowly curled the fingers of both hands into tight fists, which were now sitting completely, utterly still on the arms of the throne.  
  
Maybe he had gone too far. Maybe _this_ would be the part where En Sabah Nur finally snapped and killed him.  
  
“Oh _Charles,_ ” Came the hiss. “Are you upset about your precious children? I don’t know why. You can see them anytime you like, Charles. In fact, I’ll take you to them now.”  
  
[---]  
  
When the portal opened, Charles was practically shoved out of it.  
  
He toppled out of his wheelchair, reflexively catching himself on his arms and scratching them up on the rocks.  
  
Rocks?  
  
He was outside. He hadn’t been outside for months- he hadn’t been _allowed_. It was like En Sabah Nur didn’t grasp the concept of ‘I’m a paraplegic you fool, I can only get so far in a wheelchair’. He was still in Cairo, but En Sabah Nur had clearly done some repairs to the city; well, that accounted for what the mutant did in his spare time, at least.  
  
Charles carefully pushed himself into a sitting position. It took him a moment, but he realized that he was in the same area where his friends and students had battled En Sabah Nur.  
  
Everything was fixed, cleaned, except-  
  
Except for-  
  
And finally, Charles realized what he was looking at:  
  
It was Jean and Erik, lying right where they’d been struck down, in front of the building Kurt had teleported them all into.  
  
The sun-  
- _erik gurgling water and looking right pissed that charles had intervened until he realized he was speaking to another mutant, and then just surprise and wonder and **relief** that there was someone else he wasn’t alone **(i can’t believe it)** you’re not alone erik **(i’m not alone i’m not alone)** \- _  
  
The crows-  
  
- _jean’s hopeful face when he’d come to her house and offered her enrollment and he thought ‘such a sweet girl’ and his heart hurt for what she’d suffered and knowing that he’d found someone who understood the burden of all the voices-_  
  
Five months they’d been out here, their _bodies-_  
  
- _scott dead hank dead moira dead raven hidden peter hidden kurt unconscious and en sabah nur closing in on jean, erik standing in front of her seeing what’s coming pushing her down and trying to take the worst of it-_  
  
Something inside him snapped. Some tether anchoring him to reality had been fraying and fraying and fraying and now it had torn.  
  
The world fell away, taking the gruesome scene with it.  
  
And Charles  
  
finally  
  
let  
  
 _go-_  
  
[---]  
  
Darkness.  
  
 _(What’s wrong with him?)_  
  
[---]  
  
Charles was home.  
  
The sun was bright, but there were no students outside.  
  
He reached out. _Hank?_  
  
Nothing.  
  
 _Jean?_  
  
Nothing.  
  
 _Jubilee?_  
  
Nothing.  
  
 _Alex? Scott?_  
  
Nothing, nothing.  
  
 _Anyone?_  
  
Silence.  
  
The house was empty, devoid of life. He wheeled through each hallway, every room, calling out names and thinking that maybe the only reason he wasn’t getting a response was because he wasn’t calling out the right one. Surely if he landed upon the right name, someone would respond.  
  
“Mary? Henry? Sandra?”  
  
Nothing, nothing, no-one.  
  
Charles went outside, and was taken aback to see the lawn was covered in- they looked like-  
  
Tombstones.  
  
The front lawn had turned into a graveyard.  
  
“No,” Charles whispered, covering his eyes. “No, no, no,”  
  
“ _Charles!_ ”  
  
His head shot up. It had come from the graveyard. “Raven?”  
  
“ _Charles!_ ” That was Erik.  
  
“ _Professor!_ ” Scott.  
  
“ _Charles!_ ” Moira.  
  
“ _Professor!_ ”  
  
“ _Charles!_ ”  
  
The voices, all of them known to him, rose together in a cacophony of calls.  
  
Charles hunched over and covered his ears.  
  
[---]  
  
Darkness.  
  
 _(Man, he’s really messed up.)_  
  
[---]  
  
Charles was lying on his back, staring up at a bright light.  
  
“It’s okay, Charles, it’ll be over soon.”  
  
He turned to his head to his left. Raven was standing off to the side with Alex and Hank. All were wearing hospital smocks.  
  
He looked up.  
  
There were doctors standing around him. One of them was Bolivar Trask.  
  
He had a scalpel in his hand.  
  
“Deep breaths, Professor.”  
  
They started cutting into his stomach. There was no anesthesia. He screamed.  
  
Blood sprayed the walls, the floor, his face.  
  
They reached into him.  
  
The creature they pulled out had mottled blue skin and pure white eyes. When it opened its mouth to scream, its voice was warped.  
  
“Wow, that’s, uh-” Hank affected an alarmed face. “Yikes.”  
  
“I think it looks cute,” Raven said defensively. “Just like its dad.”  
  
“Which one?” Alex snorted.  
  
[---]  
  
Darkness.  
  
 _(Can you die from going nuts?)_  
  
[---]  
  
He was in bed. Naked.  
  
Erik was beside him, smoking.  
  
“God, I had a nightmare.” Charles whispered. “A really, really awful one.”  
  
“Are you alright?”  
  
Charles took in a deep, shaky breath. “No, no I’m not.”  
  
“Oh Charles,” Erik sighed, and leaned over and kissed him deeply. He tasted like smoke and ash.  
  
When he pulled back, Erik had become Moira.  
  
Charles stared up at her, comprehending and not all at once.  
  
Moira tilted her head to the side. “What’s wrong?”  
  
He shut his eyes. “My head hurts. I have to sleep.”  
  
“The nightmare will come back.”  
  
“I know.”  
  
[---]  
  
Darkness.  
  
 _(It’s been almost a month. I don’t think he’s getting better.)_  
  
[---]  
  
Charles was in a classroom at the school, grading papers.  
  
“Uh, Professor?” It was Scott, looking nervous and guilty.  
  
“Something wrong, Scott?”  
  
“There may have been a little… Accident.”  
  
“Are you hurt?”  
  
“No, uh… Not me.”  
  
Then Jean stepped in, and Charles’s mouth dropped open in horror.  
  
Jean’s skin was melting off her body.  
  
And there was a hole punched clean through her chest.  
  
The damage made her face barely recognizable. “Sorry, Professor,” She said.  
  
“Jean!” Charles began to gag. “Oh my God!”  
  
“Yee-ah, my glasses kinda fell off. My bad.” Scott apologized.  
  
“It’s really not that bad, I think I’m okay.”  
  
A hunk of flesh fell from her face.  
  
Charles vomited.  
  
Seated at the back of the classroom, Logan shook his head in disgust.  
  
“Boy oh boy, am I glad I went through hell and back to change the future so that you assholes could go and let a fucking Smurf destroy it.”  
  
[---]  
  
Darkness.  
  
 _(Is he **still** like this?)_  
  
[---]  
  
At some point, the ceiling became a permanent fixture in Charles’s view.  
  
It was stone, smooth and dark and solid.  
  
Light came and went. He did not count how often.  
  
Dim voices came and went with it. He didn’t count that either.  
  
On the rare occasion, there was touch.  
  
Charles continued to stare right up at the smooth, simple stone.  
  
 _Should I get up?_ A little voice whispered in his head.  
  
“Fuck no,” he said back.  
  
 _What about the nightmares?_  
  
“Which ones? The waking or the dreaming kind?”  
  
[---]  
  
Darkness.  
  
 _(Leave him.)_  
  
[---]  
  
In the darkness there was sound.  
  
Loud sound and small sound.  
  
Sound above. Sound behind. Sound all around.  
  
Sometimes sound made things move.  
  
Sometimes sound made things stop.  
  
Sometimes sound felt bad.  
  
Sometimes sound felt good.  
  
Bad sound-  
  
 _-(kohm too mee chars)-_  
  
Good sound-  
  
 _-(thuh histoh ree ov janetics cahn beee somed up)-_  
  
Bad sound came from far away.  
  
Good sound came from everywhere else.  
  
[---]  
  
Light.  
  
[---]  
  
For the first time, Charles was lucid again.  
  
It felt like coming out of the worst sort of hangover he’d ever had. And he had had a few of those in his lifetime. He pressed a hand to his head, wincing.  
  
Abruptly, he became aware of someone else in the room.  
  
Charles went to sit up and look around, panicked, wondering if it was-  
  
Oh _hell_.  
  
In the process of sitting up, he’d found himself encumbered by something that hadn’t been there when he’d been awake last: His stomach had expanded further, towards something one would expect to see at the end of a pregnancy rather than the middle of one. Either he’d been out of it longer than he realized, or his previous belief that whatever was inside him was growing far faster than a normal baby was correct. In fact, he-  
  
Wait.  
  
Charles tried to clear his mind of the cobwebs that seemed to have accumulated. He tried to focus on that foreign presence, and…  
  
…It was coming from _him_.  
  
“Oh, you’re kidding me,” Charles whispered, eyeing his stomach with something like fear. The last dream was still at the forefront of his mind; it was even stranger and nonsensical than the others, confusing rather than frightening, and now he understood why: It was the baby.  
  
It made some sense, he supposed. En Sabah Nur could shield others from Charles’s telepathy, but he couldn’t very well shield him from someone that was inside him. It probably hadn’t even occurred to him that the baby _had_ a mind to shield just yet.  
  
In fairness, it hadn’t occurred to Charles either.  
  
Delicately, he gave a little prod at the tiny wisp of a consciousness. Quite unexpectedly, he felt a very real, very physical movement inside of him. Mentally, what he felt was very… _raw_ , one could say. He did not feel the nuanced, swirling thoughts and emotions that came from almost everyone else. What he felt here was simple: Fear, restlessness, and contentedness.  
  
Which, for all intent and purpose, seemed rather reasonable for a baby.  
  
Somehow, that relieved him. He didn’t know what he’d been expecting- ‘Rosemary’s Baby’? Some sort of immediate signal that this child was as evil and corrupted at the core as En Sabah Nur was? Some small sign that Charles’s nightmares were going to come to fruition once it was born?  
  
He didn’t feel anything like that. Not at all.  
  
Swallowing, he remembered the dream. As of right now, the baby was agitated, restless from the prod at its mind. Charles took a deep breath. “Hello?” He waited a moment, but the agitation was still there. He tried to think of something to say. What came to mind was not something he terribly wanted to linger on (his last lesson in his last class), but it was something: “Let us now start fresh without remembrance, rather than live forward and backward at the same time. We cannot build the future by avenging the past. Let us sit down as brothers and-”  
  
There. There it was. Calmness was settling in. If there was any doubt that what he was feeling was the baby reacting to what it heard, it was gone now.  
  
He didn’t know whether to find that comforting or concerning.  
  
[---]  
  
“You’re awake- _and_ aware.”  
  
He’d known En Sabah Nur was due for a visit. At least he hadn’t walked in on him having a conversation with himself.  
  
Charles scowled at him. “No thanks to you.”  
  
En Sabah Nur shrugged slightly. The smile on his face was cool. “What did you think I meant when I said I was bringing you to your children, Charles?”  
  
“Hoping that you were going to kill me, actually.”  
  
En Sabah Nur rolled his eyes in a terribly long-suffering way. “The same song again. You need to learn a new tune, Charles.” He glanced down at Charles’s noticeably-larger stomach, and the smile became something ugly, something smug and cruel. “More to the point, you may not have a choice.”  
  
[---]  
  
What Charles hadn’t been expecting was Storm.  
  
En Sabah Nur had “suggested” that Charles remain in bed, given the “delicate nature” of his “condition”.  
  
Charles, still just a touch bitter about having his student and best friend’s corpses sprung on him without any warning, had suggested that En Sabah Nur eat his own dick.  
  
En Sabah Nur, who was clearly a god and not at all a childish pissant of a mutant, turned Charles’s wheelchair into dust.  
  
And so now Charles was stuck in bed with no way to move beyond it short of crawling. This would be next to impossible given that he would have to do so on his stomach, which was already proving to be an issue.  
  
Storm came some hours after En Sabah Nur had left, peering cautiously around the room before looking at Charles directly. “Hey.”  
  
Surprised, Charles straightened up a bit. “Hello.”  
  
She entered the room awkwardly, like some of the students used to enter his office when they thought they were in trouble but didn’t know why. She held out a few books to him. “I thought you might like these.”  
  
Charles blinked. “Uh- thank you, thank you very much.” He took the books gratefully, if not bemusedly.  
  
“I asked En Sabah Nur, and he said you were awake and confined to your room. I thought…” Storm trailed off with a little shrug.  
  
“Why did you ask if I was awake?” Charles inquired as he glanced over the titles of the five separate books she’d brought. He’d read two of them already, but oh-fucking-well, beggars couldn’t be choosers.  
  
Storm sniffed and averted her eyes. “You were, uh… Kinda out of it for a long time. We thought maybe you’d gone crazy.”  
  
Charles laughed darkly. “I wouldn’t rule that out just yet.”  
  
“Anyways, I wanted to know if you were better. And now you are, so…” She gestured at the books. “Enjoy.”  
  
Charles deflated a little. Maybe it was his soft-spot for children, maybe it was the fact that this was now the second act of kindness Storm had bestowed (or attempted to bestow, anyway) on him. “I will. Thank you, Storm. I really and truly appreciate this.”  
  
Storm nodded. She half-started for the door, and then turned back. “My name’s Ororo. You can call me that if you want.”  
  
Charles smiled. “Certainly, Ororo.”  
  
[---]  
  
It didn’t take long to settle back into the monotony of pre-complete-and-utter-mental-collapse life.  
  
Except that now it was even more monotonous because the only time he ever left bed was to use the lavatory. He’d been rather blunt with En Sabah Nur that he damn well couldn’t get to the lavatory without his wheelchair, and so the mutant had begrudgingly fashioned him a new one.  
  
Food appeared and disappeared from the bedside table at the appropriate hours of the day. Literally, just randomly appeared out of thin-air. En Sabah Nur must have been tiring of his attitude, because he didn’t check in quite so often anymore.  
  
The baby’s consciousness was ever-present, but Charles had lost any desire to prod at it. With En Sabah Nur’s visits lessened, the child seemed consistently content. As long as Charles was calm, so was the baby.  
  
He poured over every one of the books Storm brought him in excruciating detail to distract himself. She checked in every now and then, but never stayed for too long, looking nervous at the idea. He wondered if En Sabah Nur had ordered his Horsemen to limit their interactions with his appointed fuck-toy.  
  
The days dragged on, and Charles waited, knowing the end of this particular bit of monotony was coming soon, but not wanting to focus too much on what would happen when it did.  
  
[---]  
  
The monotony was broken on an unusually cold night two weeks after his waking from his semi-coma.  
  
Charles woke up slowly, disoriented, unsure of what had roused him. It wasn’t a nightmare, it wasn’t a person, it wasn’t a sound…  
  
He winced as a dull but noticeable cramp ran through his stomach and back. The pain lasted maybe a moment or two, and then dissipated like it had never been there. Any grogginess he’d had went with it.  
  
Charles swallowed nervously, taking stock of himself now that he was awake enough to do so. That pain seemed to be the only thing out of place, the only disturbance on an otherwise normal night.  
 _  
Could be nothing,_ he thought. _Could just be a cramp. Or false labor._ If he had the appropriate parts to carry a child, then he had to assume that he could fall victim to the same issues as any other pregnant person would.  
  
But Charles also knew that this had progressed far faster than normal, and that in reality… It was entirely possible that the time had come. The time that he had studiously refused to think about except in his darker nightmares. Hell, it was possible his incredibly stressful stretch of trauma-induced madness might have brought it on sooner too.  
  
So… What to do?  
  
Call someone? Pretend nothing was wrong?  
  
‘Call someone’ really meant ‘call En Sabah Nur’, and that was the last thing Charles wanted to do. Pretending nothing was wrong didn’t seem like a fabulous idea either; if all the right parts meant all the same potential for complications, then he had to assume that this might very well be the start of what some people would call a medical emergency. It might be smarter to call for help now than later.  
  
But…  
  
Did he want that?  
 _  
If_ something went wrong, and En Sabah Nur wasn’t aware… That meant Charles might die. It was the way out he’d been hoping for since the day the world had been destroyed. And really, all he had to do was lie there and keep quiet and let nature take its course. This idea, in all reality, was terrifying; however much he had accepted that death was the only way he would ever get away from En Sabah Nur and this hell-hole of an apocalyptic wasteland.  
  
Charles laid back down and covered his eyes.  
  
God, everything was just so _fucked_.  
   
[---]  
   
Some twelve hours after the pain started, En Sabah Nur came to him.  
  
So there went that idea.  
  
“Goodness, Charles,” He remarked when he noticed Charles’s obvious distress.  
  
Any hope that this was just some mild cramping or false labor had pretty much evaporated at this point. The pain had started off slow and mild, something that could be ignored and slept through to some extent. It had increased steadily, and now Charles was at a point where he was no longer able to ignore it. Each wave had him gripping at the sheets of the bed and gritting his teeth.  
  
“Go the fuck away,” Charles snarled.  
  
En Sabah Nur’s eyes traveled over him with an air of only mild interest. “I don’t think that would be wise, Charles. You seem to be in some pain.”  
  
“Oh, _really?_ How very _fucking_ observant of you.”  
  
He looked so fucking _smug_ about it too. Like he was enjoying seeing Charles in pain (he probably was). En Sabah Nur calmly summoned a chair from the corner and set it by the bed before taking a seat.  
  
“So are you going to do something, or are you just going to sit there?”  
  
“I was thinking of letting nature take its course,” En Sabah Nur said smoothly.  
  
“How the fucking hell do you think it’s going to get _out_ , then?” Charles snarled. “You didn’t give me one of _those_ , if I recall.”  
  
Later on, he would reflect on that question and wonder if maybe keeping his mouth shut might have been the better option. Dying trying to naturally birth a child that had no natural way of getting out of his body would have been kinder than continuing this hellish parody of a life.  
  
“You are quite right, Charles,” En Sabah Nur acknowledged, settling a hand on Charles’s stomach. “Let me fix that.”  
  
For a moment, there was nothing.  
  
Then it was just _agony._  
  
It felt as though someone were ripping him apart.  
  
Literally, like someone had reached inside him with their bare hands and started stretching and tearing and clawing everything. Like they were trying their best to tear him in half.  
  
Within seconds there was nothing but a blind haze of agony. At its peak, there was nothing- his brain was too overwrought with pain to process anything around him. But during the build-up and the calm-down, when his brain had just enough ability to process, he thought he would go mad from it all. All he could do was scream, just as he did when he’d felt the billions of people in the world die.  
  
At some point, the pain died down to something more manageable. Charles couldn’t pinpoint exactly when that had happened, because the intense pain had seamlessly segued into a rather potent panic attack that left him gasping for air.  
 _  
Dyingdyingdyingcan’tdothisdyingdyingIcan’tIcan’tIcan’tI **can’t**_ -  
  
And then, suddenly, the pain and the panic were both gone. Charles was suddenly, inexplicably calm again. He sucked in a few deep breaths and tried to gather his thoughts, confused from the sudden jump from ‘overloaded’ to ‘peaceful’.  
  
En Sabah Nur was still there, still with his hand on Charles’s stomach, his iris and pupils half-vanished into the white of his eyes. He was still using his powers.  
  
That thought should have alarmed Charles- it didn’t. On a hunch, he attempted to make himself anxious, attempted to remember anything and everything that would make his heart race in panic- but nothing. His heart-rate remained steady.  
  
“What are you doing to me?” He whispered, voice still strained from the screaming. “I was panicking, and now I’m completely calm. You did something.”  
  
“Would you rather be panicked?”  
  
No, no he wouldn’t, but it was still maddening beyond all belief because damn it, damn it, _damn it_ , it was another way in which En Sabah Nur had sought and succeeded in controlling some part of him. Soon there would be nothing left of himself at all, transference or not.  
  
“Stop it. I’m fine now.”  
  
“The child shared your distress during your episode. If you panic, you’ll make it worse.”  
  
“And whose fucking fault is it that I was ‘ _distressed’_?” Charles snarled. En Sabah Nur ignored him. “Why didn’t you just do that when you gave me the other parts?”  
  
“It would have spoiled the surprise.”  
  
Charles fell silent then, simply because he could not muster the words to describe how violated he felt. He felt like a fucking _toy_. ‘It would have spoiled the surprise’. More like it would have ruined the joy the bastard gained from watching Charles suffer, watching his pain and misery and fear and confusion.  
  
“I hate you,” Charles said, and somehow it felt far more potent than any of the previous occasions he’d said it.  
  
“I know.” As expected, En Sabah Nur sounded utterly untouched by the declaration. “Now relax, Charles. This will take some time.”  
   
[---]  
   
From there, the progression of events seemed more natural- inasmuch as anything about this fucking situation could be called natural. The pain wasn’t nearly as profound as it had been when En Sabah Nur had- had- _altered_ him, but it was aggressive enough that once or twice Charles nearly said, “If you can change my fucking anatomy, then can’t you just take the bloody thing out of me yourself?”  
  
But he stopped himself. If En Sabah Nur _did_ attempt some abomination of a cesarean-section, it would probably be even more painful than what he’d done before (and that right there brought up memories of that trauma-induced dream, thank God he wasn’t feeling “ _distress_ ” at that moment or he’d be losing his shit).  
  
All the modifications in the world did not change the fact that he wasn’t built for this sort of thing: When the head emerged, Charles made a horrible noise as a white-hot pain lanced through him and, even from his awkward vantage point, he could see blood flowing onto the sheets.  
  
“ _Shit!_ ”  
  
He wanted to stop it, wanted to prevent any more damage, but either En Sabah Nur was doing something to “aid” in this process or his body was just eager for it to be over with, because the contractions kept the baby moving.  
  
“Nearly done… Good, yes.”  
  
“Shut up! I don’t want to hear your fucking voice right now!” Charles barked, knotting his hands into the sheets. All the same, he shut his eyes and didn’t watch as En Sabah Nur leaned over and reached between his legs. There was a sharp, stinging pain that made him yelp, and then-  
  
“Done.”  
  
In a matter of seconds, the baby was on Charles’s chest and En Sabah Nur was attempting fix the steady flow of blood from where he’d torn.  
  
For a moment, Charles thought the baby was dead. It was silent, and its skin had a strange pallor to it, the sort one did not associate with live, healthy babies. But soon enough it breathed, it cried and waved its arms and legs, and did every other normal thing that a newborn does. The only noticeable difference was the skin.  
  
It didn’t look monstrous in the least.  
  
Charles lightly touched the baby’s consciousness. As it happened, ‘distress’ seemed to be the prevailing feeling despite En Sabah Nur’s intervention. He thought about trying to project some calmness onto the child himself, but between En Sabah Nur’s presence and his attempt to fix the damage the it had caused on the way out, that sounded like a poor idea. So instead, he awkwardly pulled it to his chest and tried to soothe it the old fashioned way.  
  
Really… The child wasn’t so strange. The skin was a bit odd, but it didn’t have glowing yellow eyes or ‘666’ tattooed onto its scalp. It didn’t look evil, didn’t sound evil, didn’t _feel_ evil.  
 _  
It’s just a baby. **He’s** just a baby._  
  
After a few minutes, the child calmed down, curling in towards Charles’s chest, small chest rising at a more reasonable pace than before. He looked quite… peaceful, actually. Sweet.  
  
 _Oh no. Oh no, no, no, no._  
 _  
Don’t do this._  
 _  
Don’t get attached._  
  
It occurred to Charles with sudden, vibrant clarity that there was another very good reason to go through all this fucking trouble just to get a child. Really, he could have expended less effort with Psylocke or Ororo- but he had chosen Charles. Why? Because Psylocke and Ororo were already loyal.  
  
Charles needed to be _trapped_.  
  
En Sabah Nur knew Charles had a soft-spot for children, having presided over an entire school of them. He’d known Charles had every intention of ending his life when the opportunity presented itself. He knew that Charles had no reason to continue clinging to life in a world where he was ruled and controlled by a man he hated, and all of his loved ones were dead. So what had he done?  
  
Given Charles a reason to live. A reason to think twice about how readily he wanted to die.  
  
Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, _fuck_ En Sabah Nur, that son of an abominable _bitch_ , that had been his goal from day one.  
  
Charles wanted to kill him. He wanted to set the baby down, wrap his hands around En Sabah Nur’s throat and _squeeze_ until the fucker died choking on his own blood. He wanted to slam his head into the stone floor, stab him, shoot him, rip him limb from fucking limb and-  
  
“Give him to me.”  
  
It was as though an ice-cold hand had clamped down onto Charles’s heart. All anger abruptly distinguished, he held the baby a little tighter. “Why?”  
  
En Sabah Nur gave him the same look he’d given him that day on the cliff, when he’d said he couldn’t possibly speak to every mind on earth without Cerebro: One that said “don’t be an idiot, you should know better.” When he spoke, he did so as one might to an especially stupid child. “He is my son, Charles. I would like to hold him.”  
  
Charles swallowed, eyes burning, tears threatening to fall. Damn it. God _damn_ it, this was going exactly the way En Sabah Nur wanted. “Are you going to try to take him?”  
  
The cold triumph in En Sabah Nur’s smirk made Charles want to punch him. “No, Charles, I won’t take him from you.”  
 _  
Today._ But that went unsaid.  
  
And so Charles carefully handed the baby over to him. If En Sabah Nur was moved by the sight of the child, he hid it well. Indeed, the look in his eye wasn’t too different from the one he’d given Charles when he’d been trying to determine if their coupling had produced the desired effect; critical, searching, analytical.  
  
“Have you had other children?” Charles asked, the question coming out before he could really think about it.  
  
“I have,” En Sabah Nur affirmed, examining the child’s head. “Though they are all long dead now.”  
  
He didn’t sound terribly moved about that either, and Charles’s desire to take the baby away from him grew stronger. “How many?”  
  
En Sabah Nur hummed contemplatively. “Nine, at least. Possibly more. I had no use for the weak ones, and did not claim them as my own.”  
  
Right. Good.  
  
Charles never wanted En Sabah Nur to as much as _look_ at the child ever again.    
  
“This one, however,” The mutant remarked slowly, “Has a great deal of potential. I’m pleased.”  
  
“Good for you,” said Charles, shortly. “Can I have him back now?”  
  
The baby had been growing increasingly restless the longer En Sabah Nur had held him. He didn’t have a fully developed sense of fear yet- but Charles knew that probably wouldn’t take very long. If En Sabah Nur was intent on making this child some sort of heir, some sort of pseudo-successor (the ancient mutant clearly had no plans of dying any time soon) then Charles had no doubt that that process would be an unpleasant one.  
  
Quite unintentionally, another reason to live came to mind: Ruin En Sabah Nur’s plans for this child at any fucking cost. No child of Charles’s would become a monster if he had anything to say about it.  
  
En Sabah Nur handed the child back to him, and the effect was almost immediate: The baby’s restlessness began to subside, and he resumed his cozy position against Charles’s chest. Charles sighed with relief.  
  
It was short-lived.  
  
En Sabah Nur leaned in close, the kind of ‘close’ he only ever was when Charles was about to have a very long, very _bad_ night. The older mutant’s hand closed tightly around the bicep of Charles’s left arm, holding him in place so he couldn’t lean away.  
  
“You think you can protect him from me,” He whispered, his breath warm, hot, _scalding_ on Charles’s ear. “You think you can change his fate. While I respect the stubbornness of your hope, it would perhaps be best for your mental health if you shed yourself of this delusion.” His grip on Charles’s arm grew painful. “You may have carried him, you may be part of him, but he is _my_ son, above all else. Soon, you will know what that means, Charles.”  
  
There were things Charles could have said. ‘We’ll see’, ‘Fuck you’, and ‘Get the hell out of my room you lunatic’ were on the short-list.  
  
But no. Charles sat right where he was and met En Sabah Nur’s gaze in complete and utter silence. Let the bastard glean whatever he wanted. He knew he was going to get the fight of his fucking life regardless.  
  
After a long, unbearably tense moment, En Sabah Nur pulled back. A portal opened behind him and he disappeared through it without another word.  
  
Once he was gone, Charles slid down on the bed, oblivious to the bloody sheets still clumped together below him. It raised a new concern- where was he going to keep the baby? He’d have to sleep in the bed with him for some time, at least until he could convince En Sabah Nur to give him a cradle (well, that could be a new pastime- bothering En Sabah Nur for baby supplies, a subtle and entertaining revenge for all this bullshit).  
  
“Well, little one,” Charles muttered, setting the child down on the clean side of the bed and pulling , “I suppose you and I are in this together now. I’ll have to give you a name, won’t I?”  
   
The child had relaxed to such a point that he seemed to be nodding off. That didn’t sound like a bad idea, really: Charles was beyond exhausted, not just from everything that had happened, but thinking about everything that would inevitably come in the future. The endless possibilities, many of them decidedly grim, made his head hurt.  
  
“Oh, fuck it. It can wait. I know who you are and you know who I am, and that’s all that matters right now, hm?” Charles settled in, shutting his eyes and falling asleep quickly.  
  
He had nightmares, of course.  
  
But this time they were of the future, and a pale-skinned boy with dark, cold eyes.  
  
-End

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Completely forgot to add this when I first posted:
> 
> The boy who Psylocke captured was Croatian.
> 
> “Tko si ti?”=“Who are you?”  
> “Ja sam Bog.”=“I am God.”  
> “Bojiš li se?”=“Are you afraid?”  
> “Dječak,”=“Boy,”  
> “Da, gospodine.”=“Yes, sir.”  
> “Čestitam, mladiću,”= “Congratulations, young man,”  
> “Imate svrhu.”= “You have a purpose.”
> 
> If at any point you notice that I mistranslated something, just let me know.


End file.
